"The one who stops, dreams" is carved on the stone of the fountain placed in the middle of this small square in the centre of Florence.

Actually, this space wasn't created to be a square: originally it was part of the XV Century monastery dedicated to the Santissima Annunziata (Most Holy Annunciation) and to Santa Caterina (Saint Catherine) where the cloistered nuns called "le murate" ("the walled up") stayed and later, from 1851 until 1983, in the years when the monastery was used as city jail – le Murate jail – it was the yard where the prisoners spent their hours of recreation.

Only in the last few years, after the jail has been transformed into a public housing complex, the square has gained this new function. However, the small windows, the narrow passages and the ancient walls keep on telling the past of this wide part of the city, and also the modern metal pillars that I have represented in my watercolour, resembling the bars of a gigantic cell, are intended to maintain the memory of this place, which as can be read on the same fountain, once was "a place of punishment and duress" and "is now a public square dedicated to freedom and to the flow of life".